Author Archive
Monday, December 29th, 2008
I've said this two or three times in different ways in the past few months, but I figure it was time to copy and paste it so I could share it with y'all.
Books are artifacts of our culture and will continue to exist for a long time, and maybe some ...
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Saturday, November 22nd, 2008
In fits of melancholy, I get up from my desk and pace in the stacks. I walk around the floor and try avert my eyes when I get near patrons at their computers. To distract myself, I look at books instead. I suppose it might be easier if I just ...
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Saturday, November 8th, 2008
A few months ago, I went to a professional conference and was inspired, or at least interested enough, by the keynote speaker and conversations with friends that I went and placed holds on a pair of non-fiction titles at my library: Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational and Clay Shirkey's Here Comes ...
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Monday, October 20th, 2008
Sometimes it takes near on a year to finish a thought, so here goes.
Early hype of Amazon's Kindle e-book reader raised the question of whether it could revolutionize the book industry the way Apple's iPod had recorded music. "Revolution" and its variants are some of the words I most commonly ...
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Friday, October 17th, 2008
I've been thinking a lot about leaky libraries lately. From chains on books to user authentication, we do everything we can to make sure that when people get some information from us, they have to come and get it themselves.
This is no good. It's not how the world works ...
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Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
I love reading books that teach you to farm and garden by giving hilarious anecdotes.
Adams, John Festus, Backyard Poultry Raising, Random House, 1977
Madison, Michael, Blithe Tomato, Heydey Books, 2006
Warner, Charles Dudley, My Summer in a Garden, Houghton Mifflin, 1881.
Young, Rosamund, The Secret Life of Cows, Baskerville Press, 2003.
I wish ...
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Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
I was talking to C earlier this evening about the differences between CNN's website, cnn.com, and the New York Times' website, nytimes.com. Cnn.com, I explained, both are mostly text with some media, and the difference is that CNN is adding text to their media and the New York Times is ...
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Monday, August 18th, 2008
I probably shouldn't bother, but I love to hate on American Libraries, the trade magazine of the American Library Association. In August's issue, I particularly enjoyed tearing into Adam Bennington's "Dissecting the Web through Wikipedia," in which the author entreats teaching librarians to have students analyze encyclopedia entries for bias ...
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Thursday, August 7th, 2008
In a comment on Anne-Marie's "secret library books" post last week I mentioned that I had started reading The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it by Jonathan Zittrain. I'm not sure it turned out to be a secret library book or not, but there is much to ...
Posted in book reports | 1 Comment »
Friday, August 1st, 2008
In my West-coast hidey hole, I missed all the hullabaloo about the new search engine Cuil's official launch this week. Everyone was talking, but no one was particularly impressed. The site was down. People didn't find what they expected. Pictures of the wrong things showed up in the right places. ...
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